Ideas at the House

Anna Broinowski is a filmmaker and writer. She is known for films including  Forbidden Lie$  (about hoax-author Norma Khouri) and  Helen’s War  (about anti-nuclear crusader Helen Caldicott). Her film  Aim High In Creation!  pays tribute to the cinematic genius of North Korea’s late Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il. Determined to stop a new gas mine near her Sydney home, she traveled to North Korea to lear...

Tariq Ali is a British-Pakistani political commentator and a prolific writer, journalist and filmmaker. He has been a leading figure of the international left since the 1960s. His books include  The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath   of   American Power,   The Obama Sydrome  and  The Extreme Centre: A Warning.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Joyce became international editor of  The Economist  in January 2014 having previously served as International Education Editor and Sao Paulo bureau chief. Before joining  The Economist  she worked as editor of  Plus , an online magazine about maths published by the University of Cambridge, and was founding editor for The Royal Statistical Society's quarterly magazine,  Significance . Hosted...

Michael Wesley is a Professor of National Security at the Australian National University. He is currently the Director of the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Studies in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the ANU. He also consults extensively for the Australian government. He has a new book being released this year called  Restless Continent:   Wealth, Rivalry  and  Asia's New Geopolitics . H...

Martin Ford is the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm and the author of two books:  The New York Times bestselling  Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threa t  of a Jobless Future  and The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future. He has more than 25 years’ experience in the fields of computer design and software developme...

Dan Ilic is one of Australia’s most prolific comedic voices. Dan has been making television in Australia for ten years. His credits include:  Australia’s Funniest Home Videos  (Nine),  Hungry Beast  (ABC),  Hamster Wheel  (ABC),  Can of Worms  (Ten) and  The Feed  (SBS2) as well as being a regular on comedy panel shows and news magazine programs. In 2014 Dan raised more than $50,000 through crowd-...

Johann Hari is a British writer and journalist who has written for many of the world’s leading newspapers, including  The   New York Times ,  Le Monde , and  The Guardian . He was a lead op-ed columnist for  The Independent  for nine years, and left the newspaper after it was revealed that in some of his interviews, he had used passages that his interviewees had written or said elsewhere, and pres...

Jon Ronson is a Welsh journalist, author and documentary filmmaker whose works include best-seller  The Men Who Stare at Goats  and  The Psychopath Test . He has been described as a gonzo journalist, known for his informal but sceptical, investigations of controversial fringe politics and science. His new book  So You've Been Publicly Shamed  explores public humiliation in the internet age. Hosted...

Dennis Glover is a professional speech writer, a Fellow of the Per Capita think tank and a political columnist for the  Australian Financial Review . He currently writes speeches for Labor members of parliament as well as business and community leaders. He is the author of two non-fiction works  Orwell’s Australia  and  The Art of Great Speeches. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more inf...

As an investigative journalist, Eric Schlosser continues to explore subjects ignored by the mainstream media and gives a voice to people at the margins of society. He’s followed the harvest with migrant farm workers in California, spent time with meatpacking workers in Texas and Colorado, told the stories of marijuana growers and pornographers and victims of violent crime, gone on duty with the NY...

For much of the 1990s, Helen Razer could be heard blabbing on the ABC's youth network, Triple J. While the national broadcaster still occasionally permits her to talk in exchange for money, she is now chiefly engaged in the work of writing on social and cultural matters. She works with  Crikey, The Saturday Paper and a range of publications who permit her to say terrible things. Her fifth book,  A...

Damon Gameau is well-known as an Australian film and television actor. In 2014, he directed  That Sugar Film , a documentary which examines the place of sugar in our diet. It follows Gameau as he puts himself on a sugar-laden regime consuming food that is normally considered healthy, such as fruit juice and cereals. The documentary will be released in the US in July and has now been followed by  T...

Chris Berg is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, where he specialises in civil liberties, the political economy of regulation, and media and technology policy. He is a weekly columnist with ABC’s  The Drum , and has been published in all major Australian papers, as well as the  Wall Street Journal . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Peter Doherty shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Medicine for discovering the nature of the cellular immune defence. He continues to be involved in research and divides his time between the University of Melbourne and St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. In his fifth book,  The Knowledge Wars , he goes in to bat for evidence-based reality in debates on issues such as childhood vaccination...

Miriam Lyons is an Australian policy analyst, writer and commentator. She was the founding Executive Director of the Centre for Policy Development, an independent public interest think tank set up in 2007. She recently released a book with Ian McAuley,  Governomics: Can We Afford Small Government?  The book argues that cutting public services often leads to false economies, costing more in the lon...

Chris Munro was the Managing Editor of Tracker Magazine, Australia's most read Aboriginal Affairs publication which was shut down in 2014. Prior to this he was the Political Editor for the National Indigenous Television news team based at Parliament House and a reporter for the National Indigenous Times newspaper. Chris currently works as a freelance journalist.  As an investigative journalist, Er...

Frank Brennan has a longstanding reputation of advocacy in the areas of law, social justice, refugee protection and Aboriginal reconciliation. He is known for his 1998 involvement in the debate surrounding the Wik peoples’ landmark court case. He is a Jesuit priest, professor of law and writer.  His most recent book is  No Small Change:  The Road to recognition for Indigenous Australia . Hosted on...

Lucy Hawking and renowned physicist Paul Davies discuss the life and ideas of one of the world’s greatest minds: Stephen Hawking, who joins us live from Cambridge via the latest technology, in his first ever Australian talk. There are few scientists that can be said to have touched the public imagination. Physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking is one such scientist. Professor Hawking will be ap...

Australia, like other democratic countries, is seeing a dramatic decline in trust in government. We elect people we don’t like, and then have to rely on them for important issues such as health to national security. Do we have the politicians we deserve? How can we change the unhappy status quo? Benjamin Law, Tony Windsor and Ann Sherry look at where the mistrust is coming from and what needs chan...

What sort of Australia will the young inherit? With short political cycles and ever shorter media cycles, it’s taken a high profile campaign for the Intergenerational Report to get us thinking seriously about the future. But are the responsibilities of the young and old clear? Does intergenerational equity even matter? Holly Ransom, Everald Compton and Andrew Charlton offer insights into what the...

When we live in an affluent and peaceful country like Australia, what do we do when we’re confronted by poverty and need, close to us? What are our responsibilities and how committed are we to help? Watch Peter Singer address his concept of effective altruism and shake up some of our assumptions about giving. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freedom of speech. Equality of speech. Opportunity for speech. Freedom to offend. Just some of the dimensions muddying the middle ground on this historically important topic. Chris Berg and Julian Burnside discuss how much freedom of speech we have, whether it’s enough, or too much, and who decides? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Media, politicians, thinkers… no one can decide which Australia we live in. Are we on the verge of becoming the poor white trash of Asia or poised to be an “innovation economy”? Nick Bryant, Rebecca Huntley and Marcia Langton discuss our successes and failures, what we’ve learned, and what to do about the future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Having wives allowed millions of men to do their best work, with their minds and schedules uncluttered by meal planning and school pickups. But even though women are now freer than ever to pursue their own ambitions, relatively few men are volunteering to take over the bulk of the domestic labour. Crabb’s new book, The Wife Drought, peers into the gap that was left when “housewife” stopped being a...

‘They shriek, they rage, they cheer, they despair, they exult, they scream, they laugh, they cry!’ News Limited blogger Tim Blair was not talking about State of Origin spectators, but his poll to find ‘this nation’s most unhinged hysteric’ from among his list of ten ‘frightbats’, a group of opinionated female journalists and commentators. The frightbats themselves mostly laughed off the insults, a...